An Act Of War

Security: An Iran that's building nuclear weapons sponsors a shot at terrorism and murder on U.S. soil. Will we wait until Ahmadinejad's operatives come across our porous Southern border with a dirty bomb?

The good news is the Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. with a car bomb at a Washington, D.C., restaurant was foiled. The bad news is that Iran even attempted to strike inside America.

This is something that speaks to the fruits of President Obama's apology tour: Those that should fear us don't. Iran doesn't fear America or possible retaliation any more than it did when the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah murdered 241 U.S. service members in their Beirut barracks in 1983.

What will we do? Cut off a few more bank accounts? Ask for more meaningless sanctions? We bomb Libya, the mouse that roared, but won't even send so much as an iPhone to Iranian dissidents who share a common enemy — Tehran.

In 2009, when Iranian dissidents risked their lives to demonstrate against the gray-beard mullahs oppressing them, Tehran paused briefly as the Soviet Union did in Hungary in 1956. Seeing no Western support for the uprising, Tehran unleashed its security apparatus to suppress and murder — much as Moscow ordered the tanks to roll into Budapest. Now we are Iran's target.

How it was tried should also concern us. One plotter, Manssor Arbabsiar, a naturalized U.S. citizen who holds American and Iranian passports, met with a person he thought was associated with a Mexican drug cartel to offer a down payment for the hit. Instead, he met with a Drug Enforcement Administration informant.

The other plotter is Gholam Shakuri, a member of Iran's Quds force and still at large. The Quds force is described by the Justice Department as "a special operations unit of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps that is said to sponsor and promote terrorist activities abroad." It's the Quds force that trained and supplied Iraqi and Afghan jihadists with armor-piercing improvised explosive devices to kill American soldiers.

Hezbollah has established a significant presence in the Western Hemisphere and has links to the drug cartels that are increasingly morphing into guns for hire. Individuals from state sponsors of terrorism such as Iran are among the OTMs (other than Mexicans) who hide among illegal aliens that come across our border.

Terrorism expert Steve Emerson, author of "American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us," said not long ago that compared to al-Qaida, "Hezbollah has got a greater network, much more developed around the world," including "throughout the United States," and that "potentially Hezbollah can wreak a lot more damage if they chose to attack the United States within the continental borders."

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